In Deep Jeopardy

Trump is acquitted, but he will forever be known as one of only three Presidents ever to have been impeached. He was by no means exonerated, though he was not removed from the White House either.

When his impeachment trial was over, some Republican Senators/Jurors openly admitted that Trump was certainly guilty of the charges brought before them, but his misdemeanors were not severe enough to be a cause for concern. 

Extortion must be a petty crime these days.

Everybody not hypnotized by FOX News has seen a great deal of evidence that confirms Trump has broken the law. He’s a bonafide criminal – but he was acquitted. He and his minions, especially a deranged Dershowitz, completely scammed the Senate and created a potential major imbalance of power among the branches of the Federal Government in the process.

Well, that’s not entirely true. In fact it was a foregone conclusion requiring no further scams that Trump would be acquitted. By a margin of just a few votes, he owns the Senate because he owns Mitch O’Connell, a man of lofty convictions and principles who, in 2015, emphatically proclaimed Trump as totally unfit to be POTUS. 

The champaign and beer are free flowing at Mara Logo again.  Who knows? Perhaps now the G-20 will convene there and line Trump’s pockets after all. The presidential extortionist immobilized the Congress – not with his bang, but with their whimpers. 

Are we on the brink of the failure of the Democratic Republic of America?  Has the experiment, crafted so insightfully, presciently and elegantly by the founding fathers, finally been perverted sufficiently to have run its course? Is a cabal of self-serving legislators and executive heads of state shredding the Constitution, the document that defines an American’s rights and the responsibilities to protect them? 

Do we simply not care that :

• we have a President who can never be trusted to tell any part of the Truth (a pivotal Constitutional responsibility for all)?
• we have a President who’s had enough reasons to lie more than a thousand times to maintain his own alternate world of “alternate” truths?
• we have a President who tramples the Constitutionally defined separation of powers among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of our democracy.
• we have a President  who will stop at nothing to consolidate his power by preying on law makers’ and administrators’ fear of him and their penchant to protect their lucrative positions of public trust at any cost?
• we have a President who has alienated America from some of its staunchest allies and embraced and idolizes some of the world’s most autocratic tyrants?
• we have a President who has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have extorted the newly elected president of an allied nation (under siege by Russia) to actively help his own re-election efforts?
• we have a President who openly invited America’s two most formidable adversaries, China and Russia, to meddle in US Presidential elections on his behalf – begging them on national TV to be complicit with his campaigns. That is treasonous, plain & simple.
• we have a President who has cheapened the Presidential Office into a comedy show of infantile insults, blatant lies, and pejorative nicknames of political adversaries.
• we have a President who speaks in wildly self-centered superlatives lauding every thing he does as perfection unprecedented in history: “the best ever” “there’s never been anything like it” “nothing comes close” etc.
• we have a President who relies on his regal minions to thwart the release of anything that might expose his illegal actions, lies, or other wrongdoings.

This is not a resume that should be attributable to a President of the United States.

Those who like him because he’s brash, or “he tells it like it is” are swallowing our adversaries’ bait. If telling it like it is includes extortion, undermining our allies, and blind trust in the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea, we need to fix the world “like it is.”

An unforgiving History will track the series of events and capitulations that have created this ignoble scenario. That’s the perpetrators’ inescapable problem now.

It is what it is, but it should not be.

We need to choose how it will be with the votes that are counted after November’s election. If we look ahead we might realize that Donald J. Trump is assembling the puzzle pieces he needs to become a despot, be it as a dictator, or a King.  Whether he chooses to rule a dynasty or as royalty will be defined by how he bequeaths his position to his family.

I hate that America has been dragged to this brink. I have never before been so distraught over the sickness of our American Democracy.  There are too many greedy capitulators and no obvious brave heroes left in the Republican Party. Apparently, John McCain was the last of a dying breed.

We, the American voters, have to either set things right or prepare to scatter the ashes of our Democracy.